


In Which Dori Gets a Cat

by gooseberry



Series: the stars in our sky [1]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Brothers, Childhood, Family Feels, Gen, Pets, the Brothers Ri
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-04-29
Packaged: 2017-12-09 21:21:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/778113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooseberry/pseuds/gooseberry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dori has a cat. </p><p>Or rather, the family has a cat. </p><p>Dori can remember how they got her—remembers his mother coming into his bedroom after he had already been sent to bed, waking him up and telling him to grab his shoes. She had let him wear his pajamas, and she had wrapped him up in a blanket in the backseat. It had been dark, and he had thought it was very late—now, as an adult, he thinks that it had probably only been nine or ten at the latest, but then it had seemed like a witching hour, a magical time when he was allowed to stay up late, to travel in his pajamas, to hold his mother’s hand. </p><p>----</p><p>Equal amounts of Brother Ri feels and the unconditional love of animals. Implied maternal death and suicide. It's lazy fic, which means it's all plotless feels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Which Dori Gets a Cat

Dori has a cat. 

Or rather, the family has a cat. 

Dori can remember how they got her--remembers his mother coming into his bedroom after he had already been sent to bed, waking him up and telling him to grab his shoes. She had let him wear his pajamas, and she had wrapped him up in a blanket in the backseat. It had been dark, and he had thought it was very late--now, as an adult, he thinks that it had probably only been nine or ten at the latest, but then it had seemed like a witching hour, a magical time when he was allowed to stay up late, to travel in his pajamas, to hold his mother's hand. 

They'd gone to a house, and there had been kittens, tiny little things that were round and fat and wonderfully soft, and Doris's mother had said, "Which is the prettiest, Dori."

The prettiest was a calico, all white and orange and brown and black, with blue eyes.  

Dori had held the kitten the whole ride home, and Mother sat in the back with him, and Father had driven the car through the dark, all the way back home. 

He had still been an only child then, and the concept of sharing was still a foreign idea. The kitten was his, entirely and utterly, the same way that Mother was his, and that Father was his. 

“Patches might be a nice name,” his mother prompted him, and they named the kitten Patches, and she was Dori’s to love and tease and chase and carry. Now he thinks that he had tormented the cat, lugging her around the house and hugging her too tight, but then he had only loved her, single-minded and selfish and childish to the core.

Mother called her, “Kit and Kaboodle,” and Father called her, “Patches McThatcherson,” and Patches was as much a part of the family as Dori.

She was there when Nori was born, and she was there when Ori was born, and she was there when Mother’s heart failed, only days after Ori had come home from the hospital.

Dori left the university, because someone needed to stay home with the baby. And he stayed home--he stayed home, he stayed home, he stayed home. It felt as though he never left the house, stuck on a loop between the baby’s room and the kitchen and back again, warming bottles and changing nappies and rocking in Mother’s chair.

Dori’s mother was gone, and he had nothing left of her but a rocking chair, a broken family, and a cat that followed his steps from the baby’s room to the kitchen and back again, meowing for food. Patches butted her head against his knee, and when his lap was free, she crawled into it, an old, affectionate cat with pretty blue eyes.

“Hey, Kit and Kaboodle,” he crooned to her, and he pressed his face against her fat stomach and her soft fur. He rubbed her belly and scratched behind her ears until she purred, and when Ori cried, Dori pushed Patches from his lap, and got up to fetch the baby.

And she was there when Father’s heart broke, too, never able to love his sons half as much as he loved his wife. Dori scratched Patches behind her ears, and tugged her tail, and sold the house he had grown up in, and all the things he couldn’t move alone. He moved his brothers further into the city, with a moving truck filled with mattresses and boxes of books and the second best set of dishes. He took his brothers, and his mother’s rocking chair, and his cat, all of them together, to a walk-up apartment with only two rooms.

Dori has a cat.

Or rather, the family has a cat.

She’s old, fifteen years old, or maybe sixteen. Mother would know, because she kept track of these sorts of things, but Mother died when Ori was born, and Dori is only good at counting out money for rent and utilities.

But Patches is an old cat--frail and feeble, with white and orange and brown and black fur, and blue eyes that are sunken in. (She’s not very beautiful anymore, and she seems always to be crying.)

“Put her _down_ , Ori,” Dori shouts, and he doesn’t mean snap at Ori, but Ori is always tormenting Patches, teasing her and pulling her tail and hugging her too tightly. Ori’s too young to know how to be gentle with cats, and Dori feels like he is always grabbing either his brother or his cat, trying to separate the two before someone’s hurt enough to cry.

Ori throws a fit when Dori takes Patches away, crying, “You’re so _mean_ , Dori.”

“Yeah,” Dori mutters, and he doesn’t mean to be so angry--he doesn’t mean to be so sharp. “I’m mean, but you’re meaner. Leave the cat alone.”

He hides his cat in his room, letting her down onto his bed. He tucks a blanket over her, because the apartment is always cold in winter, and then he closes the door so Ori won’t be tempted to go in and bother her. Ori stays angry for a while, scowling at Dori and huffing loudly until Dori pulls down the crayons and searches out some scratch paper.

Patches stops eating on Saturday. Dori mashes up a can of wet food with a little water, until it’s a thick, soupy mixture, and he tries to coax Patches to eat. He dips the tip of his finger into the food, then holds it out for her: she licks at his finger, then rests her head against his hand.

He pets her until she purrs, a faint, raspy sound, and hopes she doesn’t die on Sunday.

She doesn’t.

She tries to follow Dori around the apartment, her steps shaky and wide. She’s slow, and tired--she must be tired, because she is always lying down in the hallway, or in the middle of the kitchen, wherever she decides she wants to be. Nori nearly trips over her twice and Ori keeps trying to pet her, so Dori locks her in his room, where she won’t be stepped on or teased, where her fragile bones won’t be broken.

“She’s sick,” Dori explains when Ori complains. “She needs to sleep, so leave her alone--stay out of my room, Ori.”

She’s still alive when Dori wakes up on Monday morning, and Dori calls into work, making excuses about a family emergency. He takes Nori to school, and takes Ori to preschool, and then he goes home. He crawls back into his bed, and he pulls Patches into his lap, and he rubs her belly until she dies. It is slow, and it is quiet, and he wonders if this is how his parents died, too--leaving Dori behind like he’s not much to leave at all.

He wraps her body in the oldest towel he can find, and he takes her body to the animal shelter, because he’s not sure what else he should do. The lady at the shelter is kind to him, lets him sit in an examination room for a few minutes to say his goodbyes. He doesn’t have anything to say--what’s the point in saying anything at all? It’s his cat, and she’s dead, and that’s all, that’s the entirety of the matter. He does touch her paw though, and strokes her bushy tail, and wishes that he’d been kinder to her when he was a kid. (And now, when he thinks about how he used to drag her around the house, how he’d chase her and tease her and try to scare her, he thinks he never loved her as much as he should have, and god, he is sorry for it.)

“Where’s Patches?” Ori asks when Dori brings the boys home. Dori has Patches’ collar in his pocket, and maybe he should show it to Ori--but he feels selfish in his grief. Patches was his cat, the last piece of the family Dori had when he was a child, and he wants to keep his pain and grief to himself. 

“She’s gone,” Dori says, and Nori asks,

“Did she die?”

Ori cries, even though he doesn’t understand, not really. Dori doesn’t bother trying to get Ori to stop--Ori will stop when he’s tired of crying, and Ori will probably forget in a few months. Ori can’t even remember their father, so Dori doesn’t think Ori will remember an old, sad cat that had followed Dori like a dog.

Nori doesn’t cry, but he looks red-eyed and angry, and after dinner, he goes into his and Ori’s room, and slams the door. Dori fingers the collar still sitting in his pocket and ruffles Ori’s hair, and says, “Come on, Ori, we’ll watch a movie--any that you want.”

On Saturday, he helps Ori put on a coat and a pair of boots, and he nags until Nori pulls on a pair of gloves, and then he takes his brothers to the trolley station, where the animal rescue groups are always holding adoption fairs. There are hundreds of cages, full of puppies and dogs and cats and kittens. Dori holds onto Ori’s hand and tries to keep an eye on Nori as they pass by all the cages. 

Nori is making noises about a dog, which Dori does his level best to ignore. Ori is equally fascinated by everything, by the dogs and the cats and even the occasional rabbit or guinea pig. When Dori thinks they’ve seen all the cages, he asks Ori, “Well, which was the prettiest?”

The prettiest is a fluffy cat, maybe half a year old. She has long, gray fur, and big amber eyes, and when Dori scratches behind her ears, she begins to purr.

“I like her,” Ori says, and Dori says,

“She has lovely eyes.”

Dori has a cat.

Or rather, the family has a cat.

Ori calls her, “Turtle,” and Nori calls her, “Turd,” and Dori calls her, “Turtle McMyrtle.”

She’s young and wild and she chases Ori around the apartment like a dog. She cries when she’s hungry and hisses when she’s upset, and she tries to climb onto Dori’s shoulders whenever Nori is teasing her. She’s beautiful and affectionate, and sometimes, when Dori is tired and his brothers are fighting, he presses his face against the soft fur of her belly, and wonders why life is so hard.

“She’s beautiful,” he says to no one in particular, and he buys a collar the color of her eyes.


End file.
